CINEMATIC REVELATIONS allows me the luxury of writing, editing and archiving my film and television reviews. Some reviews appeared initially in "The Commercial Dispatch" and "The Planet Weekly" and then later in the comment archives at the Internet Movie Database. IMDB.COM, however, imposes a limit on both the number of words and the number of times that an author may revise their comments. I hope that anybody who peruses these expanded reviews will find them useful.

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Sunday, June 10, 2012

FILM REVIEW OF ''SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN" (2012)

Hollywood has been
cranking out cinematic adaptations of Snow White since the silent 1916 version.
In 1933, vampy cartoon heroine Betty Boop played the raven-haired
princess in a 7-minute, surrealistic, black & white cartoon from Max
Fleischer's Studios before Disney immortalized our fair maiden. Recently,
“Immortals” director Tarsem Singh helmed an adaptation of the Snow White fairy
tale called “Mirror, Mirror” with Julia Roberts as the sinful stepmom.
Now, rookie British director Rupert Sanders and freshman scenarist Evan
Daugherty, along with “The Blind Side” scribe John Lee Hancock and “Drive’s”
Hossein Amini, have reimagined this melodrama as a much darker chick
flick. They’ve made it palatable not only for girls but also guys.
Imagine “Joan of Arc” crossed with “The Lord of the Rings,” and you’ve
got a good idea about what to expect. As the second take on the venerable
Brothers Grimm fairy tale this year, “Snow White and the Huntsman” (*** out of
****) departs considerably the 1937 Walt Disney classic. The protagonist
here isn’t the clueless maiden who cooks and cleans for a clan of cuddly
dwarves. After escaping from her depraved stepmom and stumbling through a
supernatural forest with all kinds of creepy critters, “Twilight’s” Kristen
Stewart makes herself over into an armor-clad, sword-wielding Amazon who
saddles up with an army of troops to ride back to her father’s castle and reclaim
the kingdom. Good adventure movies require stalwart heroines who don’t
necessarily play second fiddle to the heroes. A bearded Chris Hemsworth,
whose character shares little in common with his Marvel Comics alter-ego “Thor,” brandishes
both a hatchet as the eponymous “Huntsman,” but he doesn’t push our heroine
around for long before she whistles a different tune. Mind you, good
adventures must also boast diabolical villains. Oscar-winning actress
Charlize Theron steals the show as the malicious stepmother and qualifies as the
most fascist femme that you’ll ever see. She is a succubus rolled up into
a sorceress. Aside from her brother, this despicable villainess abhors
men with a passion and loves literally to stick it to them—right in the gizzard
with a sharp blade.

“Snow White and
the Huntsman” follows the Brothers Grimm story when Queen Eleanor (newcomer
Liberty Ross) pricks her finger on a blooming rose in the dead of winter and
watches three drops of blood splatter in the snow.Eleanor bears a child but then not long
afterward dies.Snow White’s grieving
father King Magnus (Noah Huntley of “Your Highness”) rides into battle against
a mysterious enemy that his army hacks into heaps of obsidian shards.
Afterward, they discover a poor damsel-in-distress chained up like a slave in a
wagon on the battlefield.This
unfortunate woman, Ravenna (Charlize Theron of “Monster”), seduces the monarch
and later they marry.During their
wedding night, Ravenna stabs the unsuspecting king to death with a large knife
thrust into his chest.“Snow White and
the Huntsman” skirts blood and gore as much as possible.Nevertheless, the inventive Sanders shows
some flair by having a pitcher of wine spill at least a quart of its dark red
contents on the floor as a metaphor for the king’s loss of blood.Ravenna wastes no time with the king’s
daughter and locks young Snow White up in a tower.No sooner has this incident transpired than
Ravenna has her servants hang a mirror so she can admire her beauty.Of course, this mirror is no ordinary
mirror.Everybody knows that the wicked
stepmother-turned-queen has conversations with it.The difference is that before the mirror
replies to her, it behaves like the Robert Patrick terminator in “Terminator
2.”The mirror oozes out onto the floor
into a pool and then assumes the shape of a figure in a cloak.This ingenious touch and the many others that
ensue make “Snow White and the Huntsman” into an imaginative, above-average yarn
with surprises galore.

After Snow White has grown up, Ravenna
realizes that she has a problem. She is
beginning to age. She sends her equally
wicked brother her Finn (Sam Spruell of “Defiance”) off to fetch fresh flesh. Finn brings her a young maiden, and Ravenna
literally sucks the beauty of her mouth without touching her lips. Indeed, Ravenna imitates the infamous Countess
Báthory who slashed up young women and bathed in their blood. Eventually, Ravenna learns that she must dine
on Snow White’s heart and sends Finn off to get her. A couple of birds fly up to Snow White’s
window in the tower and she finds a loose nail.
Later, when Finn tries to dally with our heroine, she cuts him up and
escapes from the castle. The furious
Ravenna enlists the aid of a drunken lout, the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth of “The
Cabin in the Woods”) and he sets out to find Snow White. Sensing something amiss, the Huntsman alters
his allegiance and helps Snow White elude Finn and his henchmen. About an hour into the action, our hero and
heroine encounter eight dwarves who are thieves.

Future
filmmakers will have to struggle to surpass what Sanders and his scribes have
done both with the nefarious stepmother and the other elements. If some of those dwarves that associate with
Snow White look familiar, they are.
Sanders and company haven’t cast genuine dwarves. Instead, they have pasted the heads of notable
real-life actors, including Nick Frost of “Shaun of the Dead,” Ian McShane of HBO’s
“Deadwood,” and Ray Winstone of “The Departed,” onto the bodies of these little
people. You’ve got to see these gritty little
guys to believe them. The scenery, the sets,
the wardrobe, and the computer-generated-special effects are all
fantastic. Unfortunately, the chemistry
between Kristen Stewart and her two suitors, Chris Hemsworth as the eponymous
Huntsman and her childhood friend Sam Claflin, frizzle rather than sizzle. Meanwhile, “Snow White and the Huntsman” has
coined almost $100-million domestically and another $83-million overseas so
Universal Studios is talking about a sequel.
Ironically, the studio was counting on “Battleship” to deliver, but it
sank and “Snow White” has replaced it. “Snow
White and the Huntsman” qualifies as an unforgettable fairy tale with an edge.